Book Club 2025: The Moon and The Echo edited by Richard Porter

I don’t really know how I come to have this… I guess I bought it in 2022? Anyway, this is subtitled “Responses to The Moon and The Melodies”, which is an album I quite like. It’s by Cocteau Twins with Harold Budd, but not titled that way, because that would have led to higher sales, I mean, a loss of integrity or something.

It’s not an album I listen to a lot… let’s see what Emacs says:

Played 10 times (first 2007-02-25; last 2025-03-31)

I’ve only listened to it ten times since I ripped it in 1999, which is as far back as my data goes. But I put it on now while reading this thin book.

And I guess I assumed that this would be full of, er, more fan-based texts?

But it’s pretty good! I liked all the texts, but perhaps particularly the above…

… and this one…

… and somehow snooker balls with butterflies makes sense…

And this text could actually be the lyrics to one of the songs for all I know.

OK, this has inspired me to put the entire Cocteau Twins catalogue on.

The Moon and The Echo (2022) edited by Richard Porter (buy new)

It’s The Year Of Linux On The Laptop

So Firefox freaked out so violently at some kind of… security thing on a web site that it flooded the desktop with events that the laptop was unusable.

Cool cool

So I rebooted, and:

OH MY GOD! First of all, that screen is so dusty! Second of all… when rebooting, Debian now kicks in something called “packagekit”!? And it… basically does an apt upgrade; apt install… WHEN REBOOTING!?

So I have to sit here waiting — for twenty minutes — while it’s downloading packages and installing them?

Finally Linux has reached parity with Microsoft Windows and Macos: Instead of running the updates in the background, like Linux has been doing for decades, it’s now requiring users to sit and stare at it while it’s upgrading.

Not only that, it’s doing this at the absolute worst time possible — when you’re rebooting. The only reason you’re rebooting is because something bad happened, and that’s not when you want to upgrade your fucking OS! You want to get back to what you were doing!

It’s mind boggling. Who came up with this idea?

Anyway, the solution seems to be to say:

apt remove packagekit

Even though it’s saying:

That sounds serious! But apparently it isn’t? At least the laptop seems to work fine after removing those.

Remember to remove packagegit whenever you install Debian these days.

Cherry on the cake: It updated some kind of firmware so that my 5G modem no longer works. Thanks!

[Edit: Later this day.]

I was wondering whether this was a misconfiguration on my laptop or something… But I had to reboot a display machine just now, and:

Yup. 15 minutes of updating. And that’s a machine that should never, ever require any updates, and the hardware is kinda weird, so I was going “eek”, but it came back up again after the update.